


moon-rise

by azurefishnets



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Time Travel Via Dreams/Visions, Time travel that changes nothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 14:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28993557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurefishnets/pseuds/azurefishnets
Summary: Chae seizes an opportunity, the last there will ever be, and visits a specter of the past whom no one wants to acknowledge.
Relationships: Khaylmer Rope-Caller & Vagabond Girl, The Scribes & Vagabond Girl
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2020





	moon-rise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hecleretical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hecleretical/gifts).



Chae does not like the idea of going there, to that place in her internal visions, no no no, but perhaps today is special? Yes. Sometimes it is good to do things even when you do not like them, she reminds herself. And today _is_ so very special. She must make her goodbyes, sort of, even if they’re not _really_ goodbye, not to everyone. But she thinks this will be the first and last time she may ever see this person? And if that is the case…if that is the case then she will bear it as she’s borne bad things before. This is the choice she’d wanted to make, if the Reader had decided to send her through the Shimmer-Pool.

_Mister Oralech and Mister Volfred are talking together. She can see them as she rises. Time seems slow and liquid, like the waters of the Shimmer-Pool itself, but Mister Oralech’s face as he watches her ascend is…eased, somehow, from his fury and sorrow when their Reader spoke to him before. It seems to shiver back and forth from woe to wonder in the ripples of the rising water that she is pretty sure is not really water, but she thinks maybe he will be happier now that he has made peace with the end of the Rites? Yes, she truly thinks so._

She can feel the touch of the Scribes brushing her hands: fingers and feathers and scales and talons and fur and bark and paws flickering against the palms as the not-water pushes her toward the end of her exile. They whisper to her, here in the ending of their vision, telling her not to be afraid, that they remain with her even yet, that she will be ever-safe in their embrace. She luxuriates in their care for her, even while doing her very best to remember that this is not what she is here for.

_The Reader is looking up at her with satisfaction, their face pleased and happy with a job well done. She wonders if it really is? Indeed she does, but she looks forward, oh, she does! To seeing the rest of her friends again even though she will miss the ones she leaves with her whole heart. She thinks they may need her in the world above? In the clarity of Sung-Gries’s tears, she can maybe see it, although she is not sure this vision will remain with her when she reaches her destination._

Her arm is painfully clenched in someone’s hand with a cruel yank that nearly jerks her out of the rise. The fingers are bone but they are cold, terribly cold, and the tips are rounded. They have not the rough kindness of Miz Bertrude’s warm clawed hands. These hands have only the cold of death as they grasp her, pulling for her attention. She knows this grasp, both by association—she will not go back to that place where they pulled at her and kicked her and abandoned her for not being the child they thought they’d birthed, no, she will not, for so the Scribes have told her and she believes them implicitly—and also personally. Gol knows this hand. Soliam knows this hand. Their knowledge seeps into her like cold water and their alarm, as well as that of all the Scribes, howls in her ears, dazzles her eyes. She twists from the water, like a fish jumping, and lands with an undignified splat on a cold and dreary shore.

It’s grey and moisty in the weeping winds sweeping around her, and she is shivering before she knows it. A fitful moon shines overhead, and the stars burn cold and pitiless. She scrambles up, ignoring the pain, but scowls at the feel of bruises forming. She hadn’t expected a vision granted her by the Titan to be quite so…physical? It’s not fair, it’s not, to pull her from both the worlds she knows and make her be cold and lonely again, but she accepts this with a shrug. If he is, than so shall she be. She’d wanted to come here, she did, and if it must be that she is here in her own skin so much the better? It’s taken her a long time to be comfortable in her skin. Best she continues in it.

The ground shakes underfoot and she stumbles a little. There’s a howl? It feels like it could shake her from her bones, so it does, and she doesn’t like it. She reaches for the Scribes and realizes with a small, nasty shock that she can’t hear them, for the first time in her entire memory. She whimpers, just a little, back in her throat. But she’d wanted to do this? She had, she’d assured Milithe and Jomuer and Ores and Lu and Triesta and Ha’ub and Gol and Soliam even as they warned her about who and what she is visiting. Together and separately, they’d tried to dissuade her, but their Vision was ending. Someday there might be no one to hear them anymore, so there wouldn’t. She is their friend and she loves them dearly, but there are others whose voices should maybe she heard? She has to know. Miz Sandra had her chance and her choice with their Reader; this one deserves one more try as well. Doesn’t he?

She crests a small hill and there they are. Khaylmer and the Tattered Mantle, intertwined in a smothering embrace. She’s seen him before, on that strange isle where his bones lie crying to the empty air. She’d thought he was dead then? But he moved, so she hadn’t been sure, and Mister Tariq hadn’t been either. But although Khaylmer is enwrapped in the smothering love and hate of the imp-mantle, his hand reaches out. Not to her! Oh no, no, no. There’s a boat, off the misty shore, near the Barb Reef, and he reaches to it, reaches out for Soliam or maybe Gol. She’s not sure? His fingers are clenched together, his nails gouging his palms as the Mantle squeezes around him. She drifts closer. His eyes and mouth are open in an agonized and silent scream, but he is still alive. He looks almost untouched, his skin still smooth and pliant, although the mantle winds round him tight enough to make his breath crackle.

Tentatively, she shuffles a little closer still. The Titan wrapped around him ignores her but Khaylmer’s eyes catch hers and they open in shocked recognition.

“ **you** ,” he says, voiced cracked and wheezing. **“my scion comes to plead their cause?”**

“Your son?” Chae frowns, misunderstanding. “No, no, no, I think you, um, I think you maybe wouldn’t recognize—”

“ **the changeling,”** he interrupts her. **“the mantle told me you’d come someday.”**

“It still, um, it still talks to you?” Chae’s eyes widen. “We all, the Scribes and me, we thought, well, we thought that you were—”

He interrupts her _again_. **“the scribes. ha.”** His laugh is dry and cold, not even a laugh. **“the so-called demon murr has not the wits of a frog, and those who follow his visions are no better.”**

She does not interrupt him, although she can feel it, she can feel the anger beginning to boil. She waits, politely. “The Scribes are wise, and they are my friends! Yes, my very best friends, even though the Nightwings are also my very best friends and—”

 **“so you are the one that will succeed me,”** he says impatiently. **“inadequate and weak, a child with no understanding of true power, like all of those who follow murr.”**

Chae feels the Scribes’ fury in her heart then, and she wants to do as Milithe would do and strike with all her blazing magicks or maybe as Triesta would do and rake the man from face to toe with her claws. But she is not a Scribe? No, she is not, she reminds herself, and she is not here for their revenge or their fury.

“I came to say goodbye,” she says, when she thinks she can say her words evenly. “The Vision is ending? And no one will visit your island? Only the imps! And although they are good company—” this time she stops herself, clapping a hand over her mouth.

 **“ah, yes,”** he says, his voice even drier and as dusty-wheezy as the Sandfolds. **“you may see how we cling to each other. the imps and i and the mantle, we shall be together until it squeezes my bones to dust, or so it has told me.”**

Chae nods. Silently, she reaches out a hand and touches the back of his very, very softly, just with the pad of her pointer finger. “You could, um…you could maybe repent, like Miz Sandra did, sort of anyway? She—”

His laugh, or howl? Yes, maybe a howl, is joined by the imps, and the mantle, and the tempest screaming all around them. **“the arch-sister is as weak as all the rest of you. we shall go on long after you are gone, the mantle and i. be cocooned in glass, as she and the rest of her ridiculous band? no. we become each other and we shall be immortal. look, back to our future. their stars are gone but i remain.”** His hand turns in hers, quick as a flash, and grasps hers in the same cruel grip with which he’d pulled her out of gentler visions.

Chae looks at him. She never knew Khaylmer was so weak? And childish? She wants to pull away but she summons Lu’s cold dignity and Milithe’s blazing intelligence and pulls it over herself like her very own mantle.

“Your star will fade too,” she tells him, secure in her certainty. “It will stay in the sky for much less time than the Scribes’ did? _Your_ plans—

He opens his mouth to override her, to interrupt her, but this time she will not let him. No, she will not, for she must have her say in the name of all of those whom _she,_ not the Rope-Caller, represents in her own time. It is not the Scribes that speak through her, or even the Savages that reviled her and cast her out. It is the Nightwings, and the Beyonders, and all those left in the liminal spaces where forgiveness never comes and the grey light of being nothing presses in all around. She blazes with her own changing, changeling light, transformed.

‘—your plans may succeed and, um… you will be the only thing that remains in the Downside when everything else is dust,” she says, but before he can howl his triumph to the faraway sky blazing through the misty clouds billowing around them, “but, um, no one will ever remember you or even know you existed! And that seems lonely, very lonely. I do not envy you, so I do not.” She brings up her other hand, and it shines like a far-off star, clasping Khaylmer’s hand which still holds hers, as she speaks with all the cold reflection of the moon. “You will be forgotten by the time I join my friends in the stars.” Her hand burns cold, leaching any last human warmth from his. “They call me so, and I suppose I am? Moon-touched, I mean!” she continues, her voice beginning to shake with exhaustion and an emotion she does not like in herself and so will not name. “But um, Mister Khaylmer? Although they call me a Savage too, I think you are far more so than me. I think Mister Tariq and my friends and I will see the stars together while even your fellow Titans ignore you.”

Khaylmer yowls, ripping his hands away as they begin to go as grey and dry as the moon. “ **you dare—”**

She catches them one more time and stares deep into his eyes. “I don't forgive you,” she tells him, plain as breathing. “You, um, were not a good ancestor and I wasn’t a good…” her throat wants to close, but she continues, “I wasn’t, I think, a good son. But as your…” she tastes the word. “As your _scion_ I think that when people call me savage? They won’t mean it the way they mean it now. But, at the very least? You live on through me, and I'll help my friends with the Plan. That's better, I think, then your fate?"

His hands clench around hers, and his eyes soften into desperation. **"you could tell it to let me go free,"** he begs. **"the imps, they would listen to you. the mantle already seeks the wisdom you've learned—"**

But now the last of the vision is ending and the moon sets into the sea. The waters rise around her, salty and rich as blood or tears. She pats his hand and leaves him swathed tight; the Mantle rings around her ankle, just lightly, where the anklet that once was Khaylmer’s rests. It takes it and holds it up to her in salute before letting her go. A vision is only the eyes and the heart, and she has neither the heart to deny Khaylmer or the Mantle their shared immortality nor the foresight to change their fate. Thus, she rises once more into time.

_She can almost see the end of the journey if she looks up, but for just a little longer she peers down. Mister Tariq and the intimidating Miz Celeste stand together. They seem so small, and she knows she sees them with the Scribes’ eyes as well as her own, but she has always felt an affinity with Mister Tariq. He is like her? Or she’s like him? Or they reflect each other. Something like that. She doesn’t always know if the Scribes see her in their time or her own and she sometimes has a hard time remembering where and when she should be. Mister Tariq helps anchor her, or maybe it’s the moon that does? Either way they are kind/have been kind/will be kind. Go back to the stars the Heralds may, but she feels the moon’s caress on her brow even now and knows it, like the Scribes’s embrace, will always be a part of her._

“Goodbye, Mister Khaylmer,” she says, although she thinks he probably cannot hear her. “My friends? Um, I think maybe they were right about you.”

“We were.” Gol says in her ear, and she falls back into their chest. “It brings me no joy to say so, but best that you see.”

Soliam takes her face in his hands, so, so gently, and looks at her with his sorrowful eyes. “You did well. Perhaps Khaylmer shall find his absolution in time but it is no more of our affair. Or yours.”

Gol gives him a sharp look and shakes their head, but says nothing.

“They will, yes, they will! They’ll remember us all, because I can tell them about you,” she tells him eagerly. He shakes his head a little, whether in negation or acceptance she is not really sure, but she places his hand in Gol’s and gives their fingers a pat. She thinks maybe Soliam blushes a little. Gol just looks a little more stern. They don’t let go.

“This is the closest we will be to you again, child,” Triesta tells her, caressing her face with her feathers. “But have no fear, for we shall never be far either.”

Chae laughs, an explosion of joy that causes the Reader and Mister Oralech and Mister Volfred and Tariq and even Celeste to stare up at her in wonder as she disappears from their sight. “You are all so wise? And yet you are all so silly! I knew, I think, that this wasn’t goodbye! And you should all know that too!”

“You are indeed the wisest of us all,” Jomuer says, but she never knows when he’s teasing her. He always has a sardonic gleam hidden amongst his many manes. Ores and Ha’ub chatter contradicting advice in her ear. Normally she doesn’t like it when they do that, but now it just seems right.

She grins at him, at them all, even reclusive Lu and scowling Milithe, and stares up at the onrushing light, silvery and warm as the moon on a spring night. “Was it the right thing that I did? I think so, I do, but—”

They do not let her dither, as she hangs in the dying waters. Instead, they push her to the light, and they need no words to remind her that she goes with their grace and their blessing, scion and daughter of far more than the savagery that Khaylmer hadn’t known how to dispel. She disappears into the world above, more corporeal hands pulling her from the water’s rise. Far behind and beyond her in time, Khaylmer lets out a racking, wheezing cry and falls silent for the last time as the Mantle squeezes him ever firmer in its clinging embrace.

In the light of time’s shimmer as the waters run dry, those above and those below cling to each other as one vision ends and a new plan begins. Khaylmer howls his soundless scream as he dies alone from age to age; the Scribes are gone from the sky but they, too, live on in the reversed cascades of time and in the visions of Chae the changeling as she sees the moon rise and sing in the new stars.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed the read and thank you for the good prompts!


End file.
